Alice Asks the Big Questions

by Laurent Gounelle

  26

  Standing by the font, an intrigued Germaine watched the line of parishioners in front of the confessional.

  “This is crazy,” she said.

  “I never in all my life would have imagined seeing the church so full,” said Cornélie.

  “Did you think you’d see it after you died?”

  “You’re making fun of me,” whined Cornélie.

  Germaine looked someone new up and down, a man in his thirties.

  “There are even people we don’t know.”

  Cornélie made a face. “It was better when it was just us.”

  Germaine frowned and jutted her chin toward the confessional. “I wonder why so many people like it. I’m not convinced by what I’ve been told.”

  Cornélie nodded. “I’d like to be a fly on the wall.”

  Germaine looked at her friend and thought she looked more like a fat rat.

  “If only I could slip inside,” Cornélie continued, “without being seen.”

  “Start on a diet right away.”

  A woman came out of the confessional laughing out loud.

  Germaine watched her walk up the side aisle.

  “It’s not normal,” she said, shaking her head. “Religion shouldn’t make you laugh.”

  “You think?”

  “We must be like Jesus.”

  Cornélie slowly raised her eyes toward Christ on the cross, then half-heartedly agreed, sighing with a contrite air.

  The woman, all smiles, passed them as she left the church.

  Germaine was torn between her disapproval and the curiosity that was eating her up.

  “I have an idea! You go to confession. That way, we’ll really know what’s going on.”

  Cornélie went pale. “Oh no! I wouldn’t dare.”

  “What have you got to lose? Go on, go!”

  “I wouldn’t have the courage. You could go yourself.”

  “But I…I have nothing to feel guilty about.”

  Cornélie shrugged, then dropped her shoulders in resignation. “Well, you would only have to talk about our little vice.”

  Germaine frowned. “What vice?”

  “You know very well.”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “The little gossipy things we say…When we tell people what we think of others.”

  “That’s not gossip. It’s opening their eyes.”

  Cornélie was silent as her brain took in the information. “Well, in that case, pretend you think it’s a vice. In any case, you shouldn’t worry: it’s anonymous.”

  “Oh, really? He’ll recognize my voice!”

  “He’s sworn to secrecy.”

  Germaine made a face. It was something to think about.

  * * *

  Alice took the little note Sister IKEA handed her. The nun was looking at her with bright eyes, full of kindness. She smiled back. With at least a dozen others in her handbag, Alice was used to this little ritual, though its meaning still escaped her.

  She unfolded it as she was leaving the church, feeling a little like a kid opening a prize from a cereal box in the hope of finding something she needed for her collection. Except that she already had the complete set.

  Blinded by the intense sunlight that hit her as she came out of the semidarkness, she had difficulty making out the scribbled words.

  Jesus said: Whoever knows the all, but is deprived of himself, is deprived of everything.

  She reread the message three times, with an odd sensation. Those words did not come from the Gospels. She was certain of it.

  All around her, the square was empty. The tourists must have taken shelter from the heat at the beginning of the afternoon, cooling down in a tearoom or the caves at Azé or Blanot.

  She went back to her father’s house and connected her laptop to the internet. She typed in the message and started her search. Several sites reproduced it identically. All of them cited the same course: the Gospel of Thomas.

  She’d never heard of it.

  Alice then felt some doubt. She took the notes that the deaf-mute had previously given her out of her bag and spread them out on the desk in front of her. One by one, she reread the sayings of Jesus that the nun had copied out. Did they really come from the Gospels of the Bible as she had thought? It seemed so.

  She hesitated, then, to be sure, she typed the words from one of the pieces of paper into the search engine: “Blessed are you when you are hated and persecuted. Wherever you have been persecuted they will find no place,” and hit the RETURN key.

  The Gospel of Thomas.

  Let’s see…

  She picked up her Bible, skimmed through different passages from the four Gospels, and found what she was looking for. The meaning was the same in each of them, but the words were different.

  She did the same thing with the sayings on the other handwritten bits of paper. Each time, the meaning was similar, which explained her confusion, but the words were different.

  Alice took a deep breath as she looked out the window at her father’s garden. The tall bignonia in blossom clung to the old stone wall.

  All the little notes from the deaf-mute came from the Gospel of Thomas, which she hadn’t known existed up until then. She did some research on the internet and quickly found its origins.

  In 1945, near Nag Hammadi, in Upper Egypt, someone had found, by chance, an old earthenware urn in a cave. It contained fifty-three manuscripts in a dozen papyrus notebooks that archeologists call “codices.” One of them was the Gospel of Thomas, written in Coptic, a language that was similar to ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics. Archeologists were already aware of the existence of such a Gospel, as a few fragments had been discovered in the digs at Oxyrhynchus (modern al-Bahnasa), another Egyptian site, which had first been explored in 1896. The manuscript discovered at Nag Hammadi was said to be a second-century reproduction of the original text, which was written in the first century.

  According to historians, it contains elements that predate the writings known as the canonical Gospels, that is, the ones officially recognized by the church.

  Alice continued her research and found that Thomas, one of Jesus’s twelve apostles, was believed to have brought Christianity to the area now known as Syria, in the Edessa region. A Christian community was said to have been established there by one of his disciples. The community believed faith to be a way of living, a path, and not a dogma.

  A way of living, a path. That was exactly how Alice understood the words of Christ.

  At the time, the Vatican chose to declare the Gospel of Thomas apocryphal, that is, unauthenticated, even though years later during an open meeting, Pope Benedict XVI timidly reminded everyone of its importance. What could be the reason for the church’s rejection?

  She found a copy of the Gospel of Thomas online. Since Jesus wrote nothing down during his lifetime, all the words attributed to him were reported by his disciples or those close to them, which explains the differences due to memory or interpretation, since each person’s understanding was influenced, in spite of himself, by his own concerns, convictions, and beliefs.

  The four canonical Gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—each recount the life of Jesus as seen through the eyes of their authors. Matthew and John were disciples of Christ. Mark and Luke, who were close to his disciples, never met Jesus. The four versions are very similar, especially Mark and Matthew.

  Alice found the Gospel of Thomas very different. It was not a history of the life of Jesus. There were no anecdotes in it, no miracles, nothing about how he was condemned to death, nothing about his resurrection. This Gospel simply reported Christ’s words in their raw form, without embellishments or commentaries.

  As soon as she started reading, Alice felt shaken. These words made her think of the sayings of the Eastern masters—obscure and sometimes paradoxical—whose meaning was not immediately clear but which mysteriously awakened something within us.

  When she had finished, she leaned back in her armchair and looked
out the window at the flowers, the birds, the clouds, for a long time.

  What was obvious in reading this Gospel was that Jesus seemed to have a non-dualistic vision that matched up quite well with that of Lao Tzu and Eastern spiritual masters, in opposition to the dualistic vision the church ascribed to him, a dualistic vision that separates people from the rest of the world, and separates them from God.

  In this Gospel, Jesus invites us to be introspective, to know ourselves, and he stresses that God is also within us.

  Within us. But then, why did he say the opposite in the canonical Gospels? Alice remembered that a few weeks before she had checked the wording he used on the subject. When replying to a group of Pharisees who were asking him when the kingdom of God will come, he had replied unambiguously, “It is among you,” and not “in you.” Why the contradiction? Had one of the evangelists made a mistake when transcribing Christ’s words, or had Jesus been inconsistent?

  Alice sighed, deep in thought. She watched a swallow singing on the branch of a cherry tree in the garden, opposite three others perched in a row along the clothesline. She smiled, thinking that the bird was perhaps delivering some spiritual message to the other birds, a message that the others would still be transmitting two thousand years later, perhaps distorting it a little! She would have liked to be able to translate its language.

  This made her want to verify that Jesus’s “among you” was not the result of a bad translation. She found the passage in question: verse 21 from chapter 17 in the Gospel of Luke. A few clicks were enough for her to find online the main translations of the Bible, the most well-known and circulated ones.

  In the Jerusalem Bible, Alice was disappointed to find the same expression: “among you.” Then she noticed a footnote that stated, “Also sometimes translated as ‘within you,’ but this does not seem to be indicated by the context.” Well, well…

  She continued looking.

  The very respected Holman Christian Standard Bible also used “among you,” but with an asterisk pointing to a footnote that Alice was eager to read: “Also sometimes translated as ‘within you,’ but this translation unfortunately makes the kingdom of God a reality that is only internal and private.”

  She surfed the net until she found a site that published the original Greek version of the Gospel of Luke, found verse 21, and saw the expression used: “entòs umôn estin.”

  She checked several translation sites. They all translated it as “it is within you.”

  Fearing it might just be an approximation, she searched further for the word “entos” and learned that it meant not only “within” but one’s most profound inner being.

  Alice collapsed back in her chair.

  It was quite simply incredible.

  The translators had deliberately replaced “within you” with “among you” because the idea upset them.

  Monumental.

  Alice had thought that each evangelist might have accidentally distorted Christ’s words through the biased filter of his understanding. But for translators to intentionally alter the words was beyond belief. And, of course, that changed everything.

  The more a non-dualistic vision seemed likely, a vision in which each one of us, stardust, might be a fragment of the whole and thus a fragment of God, the closer Alice came to a concept that she felt she could adhere to—even if she didn’t quite know how to define the idea of “God”: A creative force? A communal conscience, of which each of us carries a fragment?

  These badly translated words of Jesus made her think that other elements of his language or view of life might have been altered in the same way. How could she know?

  Alice returned to her keyboard, searched some more, but in vain. There was so much written about the Bible that it was impossible to find anything quickly without narrowing down her search.

  She immediately thought of Raphaël Duvernet. The expert on Eastern religions probably had connections with specialists on Christianity. Of course.

  She picked up her phone, dialed the château, and insisted to his entourage that she had to speak to him. She pictured him in his wine cellar, in his Louis XIII armchair on the enormous Persian rug, surrounded by casks, good bottles of wine, and dirty glasses, having given strict instructions that he wasn’t to be disturbed. But her public relations experience won over their resistance, and, in the distance, she finally heard the familiar, laughably aggressive voice of the disgraced expert.

  “What the hell does she want from me now?” she heard him say as he got closer to the phone.

  She couldn’t help laughing.

  “What do you want this time?” he said bluntly.

  “Your address book,” she said as calmly as could be.

  “I’ve never known a woman with such nerve.”

  But he agreed.

  27

  The little road weaved its way along the mountainside. Dark clouds were quickly gathering in the changeable sky at the end of the day. Alice would arrive well before night fell. She just hoped the storm wouldn’t start before she got back. She could have waited until the next day to see Jeremy in the church or at home without rushing, but Théo had gone to bed early. Best take advantage of an evening of freedom.

  A broken-down tractor blocked access to the top of Suin Mountain. She left her car at the side of the road and crossed the Morphée Woods on foot. Scattered here and there were large, strange stones that seemed to have fallen from the sky. When she came out of the woods, she took the path that led up to the sweet-scented moor, amid the broom bushes and pale heather. Nearly six hundred meters up, the air was much cooler than in the valley.

  She soon noticed the statue of the Virgin Mary, high on the summit. As she got closer, she recognized Jeremy in the distance, standing with his back to her.

  Beneath the dim, yellowish rays of the fading sun, his black cassock stood out against the sky. Clusters of dark clouds seemed eager to reach Mont Blanc, beyond the horizon. Muted by the wind, the sound of the Romanesque church’s bells reached her from down below.

  She moved closer. Jeremy turned around and watched her walk over to him, his face impassive.

  “I stopped by your mother’s,” she said, out of breath. “She told me you’d be here.”

  He didn’t reply, simply watched her with kind detachment as her hair flew around in the wind. She caught her breath, admiring the view from so high up. In every direction, valleys, hills, wooded countryside, and forests stretched out to infinity, disappearing far beyond the horizon.

  They walked a little in silence, side by side, toward the rocks that leaned against each other at the very top of the hill, just below the statue.

  “Someone told me an old Hindu legend,” she said. “It’s about a time when all men were gods. But men abused their divinity so much that Brahma, the god of creation, decided to take their divinity away from them and hide it in a place where they could never find it. The lesser gods suggested burying it in a deep grave, but Brahma replied that men would dig and dig until they found it. The bottom of the ocean? No, they would eventually dive down and take it back. The lesser gods admitted they couldn’t think of anything else—no place existed where human beings weren’t capable of finding it someday. Then Brahma said: ‘We will hide divinity in the deepest part of man himself, for that is the only place he would never go to seek it.’ The legend concluded that from that day onward, man explored the entire world and the depths of the ocean, looking for something that lived within him.”

  Jeremy smiled and said nothing.

  They took a few more steps, hoisted themselves up onto one of the rocks, and sat down with their feet hanging over the edge. In the distance, toward the Loire Valley to the west, a bolt of lightning silently zigzagged across the sky.

  “I’ve found the Gospel of Thomas. In that Gospel, Jesus has a non-dualistic vision that is very different from the church’s doctrine.”

  Jeremy remained calm, smiling slightly.

  “So I immediately did some research,” she
said. “I’ve just spoken to a few experts I’ve gotten in touch with, passionate people whose voices are rarely heard. And I learned some things that I was totally unaware of before. It seems that the church, from its very beginnings, did everything it could to block out the non-dualistic view and present God as an external entity. In the canonical Gospels, Jesus’s words were adapted for that meaning. Even the Protestants, who had always been respectful of biblical writings, thought it right to add things. In the Lord’s Prayer, the only words Jesus dictated to his apostles, they deliberately put at the end: ‘For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory, forever and ever.’”

  Jeremy said nothing. Alice looked up at the statue of the Virgin. She could smell the approaching storm in the air.

  “The church probably completely invented the dogma of Mary’s virginity to emphasize the idea of an all-powerful external God. The problem is that Jesus had sisters and four brothers, who are discussed in the Gospels: James, Joseph, Simon, and Jude. Hard to remain a virgin with all those children. So the church officially renamed them ‘cousins,’ to preserve the dogma, and that still remains the official position today.”

  Jeremy did not react.

  “And yet,” Alice continued, “man’s divinity, which the Hindu legend puts forward, is found all over the planet. In Judaism, it is written in the Psalms, ‘You are gods.’ The Buddhists say, ‘We are the consciences of Buddha.’ And Jesus himself said, ‘I and the Father are one,’ after having affirmed that his Father is also ours. That caused him to be charged by the Jews with blasphemy and condemned to death. To top it all off, while acting in his name, the church has never stopped accusing of blasphemy anyone who adopted that non-dualistic view. You taught me about Meister Eckhart, the great Dominican mystic of the Middle Ages. I found out that the church put him before the court of the Inquisition for having revealed his view of man’s divinity to the public. The pope himself condemned him.”